Picasso, still a 14-year-old teenager from Malaga named Pablo Ruiz, arrived with his family in Barcelona in 1985, first occupying a house on Reina Cristina Street and shortly after moving to number 3 on Mercè Street, where his father died in 1913 and his mother, his sister Lola and his nephews continued to live there until 1926. His works also remained. Within those walls “everything began”, as the artist himself would later acknowledge, but of the building, demolished in 1981, not a trace remains and in the current Plaza de la Mercè where it was located and where tourists and recently married couples walk today. Leaving the courthouse, there is not a single plaque indicating that the great titan of 20th century art lived right there.
“And it's a shame, because it is very important to maintain urban memory. Otherwise, the spaces end up being open spaces without soul, without history and without any type of element to which you can attach yourself on a sentimental level," defends Coco Cugat, from the Urban Memory Architects group of Squaremmkm, who has been dreaming for years of a project that Finally today it will see the light coinciding with the Mercè festivities. It is an immersive installation that is located in the exact place where the building was and faithfully recreates the perimeter of the floor (the second first).
La Mercè de Picasso, which is the title of the installation that can be visited for free until October 1, has received advice from the expert Eduard Vallès and is part of the official activities of the Picasso Celebration. The viewer enters the 140 m2 house - actually a wooden structure with translucent walls - with a tablet that, thanks to augmented reality technology, can travel in time through that bustling Barcelona that no longer exists and discover the housing through photographs, plans or press clippings of the time, such as an editorial in the Noticiero Universal of July 1981 that, under the title A shame for Barcelona, denounced that while in Bordeaux the house where he lived had just been declared a national museum three months Goya, Barcelona condemned the house where the painter "lived for more than a decade" to pillory.
“It had to be here and on this date,” Cugat argues, because in this place where Picasso made an illustration for the newspaper El liberal that would later become the poster for the Mercè festivities of 1902. “If Picasso had not "If I came to Barcelona, it surely would not have been Picasso," argues the architect, who believes that this memory deserves to be preserved in a permanent installation, something that, she adds, would be normal in any city in the world. "For us," she argues, "it was also very important to highlight how the city, the society, the environment in which you are also ends up affecting and influencing who you end up being."
